Interview with Prof. Vandewalle

Interview with Prof. Lucie Vandewalle, KU Leuven, Belgium

Prof. Lucie Vandewalle is Emeritus professor at the Faculty of Engineering Science of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium. Prof. Vandewalle was the recipient of the Robert L'Hermite Medal in 1990. In 1994 she became Chair of the RILEM Technical Committee (TC) 162-TDF: Test and design methods for steel fibre reinforced concrete; The TC secretary was Dirk Nemegeer, BEKAERT S.A., Belgium. TC 162-TDF produced 4 recommendations and 5 Round-robin test papers; one important outcome of this TC was the recommendation of a bending test on a notched beam, which led to the European Standard EN 14651 that has become a benchmark for the characterisation of the toughness of FRC worldwide. Her manuscript Fibre reinforced concrete: new design perspectives, published in Materials and Structures and authored together with M. di Prisco and G. Plizzari in 2009, has been cited hundreds of times. Prof. Vandewalle was also the editor, together with B. Schnütgen, of the proceedings PRO31, International RILEM Workshop on Test and Design Methods for Steel Fibre Reinforced Concrete - Background and Experiences, held in Bochum, Germany, in March 2003. She has been a very active member of fib, co-authoring 1) Chapters 5.6 and 7.7 of fib Model Code 2010, and 2) fib bulletin 105 fibre reinforced concrete in 2023; she received the fib Medal of Merit in 2021.

This interview took place on 22 February 2024. Click on the symbol below to read it.